Sunday, January 31, 2016

Because of a 30 second clip of 'The Imperial March' (Darth Vader's Theme) ...The song Alex Jones uses at the beginning of every show, Sony is copyright blocking videos that have been up for years, in 243 countries, on both of my channels.

The videos remain on You Tube but 243 Countries can't see them!

We are talking a couple THOUSAND uploads since 2011...My inbox has been overwhelmed with copyright notices for the past 3 days.

I appealed one of the takedowns and must now wait a month for a response from Sony.

But, I think the way You Tube has it set up...I have to challenge thousands of uploads individually!

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Thirteen years after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is common knowledge that this war of choice was based on fabrications and slick propaganda. There were no weapons of mass destruction, the country posed no real threat to the U.S., and it was not a hotbed of terrorism until after Saddam was deposed.

While Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others were proclaiming their certainty about the imminent threats posed to the U.S. by Saddam’s Iraq, the leaked documents reveal that they knew almost nothing about any actual weapons or capabilities.

Friday, January 29, 2016

A reporter who fought the CIA for over 10 years to force it to release documents related to the Kennedy assassination is entitled to attorney's fees even if the records reveal little new information, the D.C. Circuit ruled.
Former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley has spent years investigating a potential link between a deceased CIA officer and accused Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
Morley asked for records on George Joannides, the chief of psychological warfare operations in the CIA's Miami station at the time of the assassination.
On the his website jfkfacts.com, Morley writes that Joannides controlled the Revolutionary Cuban Student Directorate, also known as the DRE, "one of the largest and most effective anti-Castro groups in the United States."
He claims Joannides gave the group up to $25,000 a month and insisted the members "submit to CIA discipline."
Members of the Directorate had an allegedly contentious relationship with Oswald, an ex-Marine who idolized Castro. They confronted Oswald on a street corner, "stared him down in a courtroom," challenged him to a radio debate and called on Congress to investigate him, Morley claims.
Unsure of what to make of Joannides-DRE-Oswald connection, Morley asked for Joannides' personnel file. He says the CIA gave him 150 pages of "heavily redacted and obviously incomplete records."
The CIA claimed it withheld information on privacy grounds or because it couldn't find the requested files.
But in 2007, the D.C. Circuit ordered the CIA to look again.

The Obama administration confirmed for the first time Friday that Hillary Clinton's unsecured home server contained closely guarded government secrets, censoring 22 emails with material requiring one of the highest levels of classification. The revelation comes just three days before the Iowa presidential nominating caucuses in which Clinton is a candidate.

Department officials also said the agency's Diplomatic Security and Intelligence and Research bureaus will investigate whether any of the information was classified at the time of transmission, going to the heart of one of Clinton's primary defenses of her email practices.

The State Department will release its next batch of emails from Clinton's time as secretary of state later Friday.

But The Associated Press has learned seven email chains are being withheld in full from the Friday release because they contain information deemed to be "top secret." The 37 pages include messages recently described by a key intelligence official as concerning so-called "special access programs" - a highly restricted subset of classified material that could point to confidential sources or clandestine programs like drone strikes or government eavesdropping.

"The documents are being upgraded at the request of the intelligence community because they contain a category of top secret information," State Department spokesman John Kirby told the AP, describing the decision to withhold documents in full as "not unusual." That means they won't be published online with the rest of the documents, even with blacked-out boxes.

Interview with author and professor of international law, Dr. Francis Boyle. The history of biological warfare development and the Biological Weapons Convention; forced anthrax inoculations of the military; anthrax attacks on congress and the resultant Patriot legislation setting up a police state; FBI agent Marion “Spike” Bowman’s thwarting of FBI investigations into both Zacarias Moussaoui and the anthrax attacks on congress.

The State Department on Friday will release roughly 2,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails but will delay the final batch of messages until after voters go to the polls in the first several primary states.

In a court filing late on Thursday evening, the department insisted that it “regrets” its inability to publish the final 7,000 pages on Friday, as a federal court ordered it to do last year.

Yet it defended the delay, blaming an internal oversight and the snowstorm that crippled Washington in the past week.

As part of the process of making the emails public, the State Department is required to have other agencies review Clinton’s emails to check if any information should be redacted or marked as classified.

According to the department, it simply “missed” sending roughly 7,000 pages of emails to other agencies and did not notice the oversight until earlier this month. Its efforts to correct the problem were further delayed by the snowstorm, which closed the federal government through Wednesday.

The department has not even sent out documents to 12 agencies to review, it said.

A significant amount of the FBI’s information used to charge Ammon Bundy came from an activist named Pete Santilli, who was living inside the refuge and broadcasting live his conversations with fellow activists.

To demonstrate a conspiracy, the government has a lower burden than it would with similar charges, such as aiding and abetting, or solicitation. A conspiracy charge in federal court does not require the underlying offense to have taken place, so prosecutors can charge the defendants based on their statements, without proving they actually committed a crime.

That is where Santilli’s broadcasts proved so useful to the FBI.

“We’re continuing the stand at the Malheur National Wildlife Reserve,” Ammon Bundy told Santilli in a conversation on Jan. 2, the day the occupation began. “Let everybody know that.”

Later, Bundy was recorded telling Santilli, “Malheur, Malheur,” at which point, the FBI affidavit says, Santilli nods and then introduces Bundy, who gives a speech.

At one point in a video, Santilli’s cameraman is recording Bundy speaking to another activist when the cameraman seems to realize he shouldn’t be broadcasting it. The cameraman steps away and bumps into someone. “I was trying to get away from that conversation,” he explains.

Paul Kantner, founding member, guitarist and singer for Jefferson Airplane and Starship, died Thursday of multiple organ failure and septic shock. He had suffered a heart attack earlier in the week, according to San Francisco Chronicle. He was 74.

British and American spies collected live video from Israeli drones as part of a classified program code-named “Anarchist,” which operated from a mountaintop listening post on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Among the files provided by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden are a series of “snapshots” from Israeli drone feeds, which offer a rare glimpse at the closely-guarded secret of Israel’s drone fleet.

The images presented here show several different types of unmanned planes, including what appear to be rare public images of Israeli drones carrying missiles. Although Israeli drone strikes have been widely reported, officially the government refuses to confirm the use of armed drones. (Neither NSA, GCHQ, nor the Israel Defense Forces provided comment for this story.

AMERICAN AND BRITISH INTELLIGENCE secretly tapped into live video feeds from Israeli drones and fighter jets, monitoring military operations in Gaza, watching for a potential strike against Iran, and keeping tabs on the drone technology Israel exports around the world.

Under a classified program code-named “Anarchist,” the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, working with the National Security Agency, systematically targeted Israeli drones from a mountaintop on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. GCHQ files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden include a series of “Anarchist snapshots” — thumbnail images from videos recorded by drone cameras. The files also show location data mapping the flight paths of the aircraft. In essence, U.S. and British agencies stole a bird’s-eye view from the drones.

Several of the snapshots, a subset collected in 2009 and 2010, appear to show drones carrying missiles. Although they are not clear enough to be conclusive, the images offer rare visual evidence to support reports that Israel flies attack drones — an open secret that the Israeli government won’t acknowledge.
“There’s a good chance that we are looking at the first images of an armed Israeli drone in the public domain,” said Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice, a history of drone warfare. “They’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to suppress information on weaponized drones.”

Thursday, January 28, 2016

A Danish news website has published documents backing up the allegations that in June 2013 a US plane with a connection to CIA black site programs was on call in Copenhagen ready to snatch NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as he was stranded in Moscow.

The story of the private aircraft, a Gulfstream V with registration number N977GA, was first reported by The Register in June 2014. The plane previously used by the American intelligence to secretly transport terror subjects to clandestine detention facilities in Europe, flew from Washington, DC over Scotland to Copenhagen, the report said.

In August 2015, the Danish news website Denfri.dk filed a number of Freedom of Information requests to the government in Copenhagen, seeking the disclosure of documents concerning the alleged involvement of Denmark in a plot to arrest and extradite Snowden. On Sunday, it reported that after lengthy deliberation, it had acquired new evidence that substantiated the claim.

Among the documents published by Denfri.dk are permission for the overflight and landing of the plane, which warns that it should be operated exclusively for “state purposes of [a] non-commercial nature,” and talking points for the Transport Ministry should journalists ask about the plane.

There is also a batch of heavily redacted emails indicating communications between senior officials in Denmark’s police, Foreign Ministry and Justice Ministry, including Anders Herping Nielsen, a chief consultant of the Justice Ministry’s international office and its former deputy head, whose responsibility it is to decide on the extradition of people for trial in other countries.

Latin America is home to 41 of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world
Caracas in Venezuela is now the most violent, according to homicide rate
Took the top spot from San Pedro Sula, in Honduras, now in second place
Drug trafficking, gang wars, political instability and corruption are blamed
U.S. cities St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans are also named

Canada’s CBC network reported Thursday that the country is slamming on the brakes when it comes to sharing some communications intelligence with key allies—including the U.S. — out of fear that Canadian personal information is not properly protected.

“Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan says the sharing won’t resume until he is satisfied that the proper protections are in place,” the CBC reported.

Earlier on Thursday, the watchdog tasked with keeping tabs on the Ottawa-based Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Jean-Pierre Plouffe, called out the electronic spying agency for risking Canadian privacy in his annual report.

Plouffe wrote that the surveillance agency broke privacy laws when it shared Canadian data with its allies without properly protecting it first. Consequently, he concluded, it should precisely explain how its citizens’ metadata — information about who a communication is to and from, the subject line of en email, and so on — can and can’t be used.

The House Judiciary Committee will hold its first hearing next week on two of the NSA spying programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden that vacuum up domestic content despite being ostensibly targeted at foreigners: PRISM and Upstream.

But, to the great consternation of 26 government accountability groups who wrote an angry letter to committee leaders on Wednesday, the public is not invited. The entire hearing is classified, and closed.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008, which has been cited as the legal authority for those two programs, lapses next year.

The debate over whether to reauthorize it is expected to be the most substantive public examination of the NSA’s surveillance regime since Congress’s decision to end NSA’s collection of bulk metadata of U.S. phone calls.

Although the cops and Feds wont stop banging on and on about encryption – the spies have a different take on the use of crypto.

To be brutally blunt, they love it. Why? Because using detectable encryption technology like PGP, Tor, VPNs and so on, lights you up on the intelligence agencies' dashboards. Agents and analysts don't even have to see the contents of the communications – the metadata is enough for g-men to start making your life difficult.

"To be honest, the spooks love PGP," Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, told the Usenix Enigma conference in San Francisco on Wednesdy. "It's really chatty and it gives them a lot of metadata and communication records. PGP is the NSA's friend."

Weaver, who has spent much of the last decade investigating NSA techniques, said that all PGP traffic, including who sent it and to whom, is automatically stored and backed up onto tape. This can then be searched as needed when matched with other surveillance data.

Given that the NSA has taps on almost all of the internet's major trunk routes, the PGP records can be incredibly useful. It's a simple matter to build a script that can identify one PGP user and then track all their contacts to build a journal of their activities.

An investigation by CBS News discovered that the Wounded Warrior Project has a dismal record when compared to other similar charities, though the group managed to pull in $300 million just in 2014. The organization apparently raised more than $1 billion since 2003.

“Their mission is to honor and empower wounded warriors, but what the public doesn’t see is how they spend their money,” Army Staff Sgt. Erick Millette told CBS News. Millette worked with the project for two years before quitting from disillusionment, saying that the charity was little more than a scam to bring in money and spend on extravagant and luxurious parties, as well as other non-vet-related expenses.

The Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust, in contrast, spends 96 percent on veterans and Fisher House spends 91 percent.

Ricardo Martinelli resides in a condo at the Atlantis, a luxury high-rise on Florida’s Biscayne Bay made famous by the TV series Miami Vice. A hefty, white-haired billionaire, Martinelli, 63, was viewed just a few years ago as one of Latin America’s most popular leaders: From 2009 until 2014, he was president of Panama. But now, though he’s living in high style, Martinelli is a fugitive from justice.

He fled his country on Jan. 28, 2015, hours before Panama’s Supreme Court announced a corruption investigation into his administration. Among the charges Martinelli faces is political espionage, with a possible prison sentence of 21 years, for illegally eavesdropping on the phones and emails of more than 150 people: Panamanian opposition leaders, journalists, judges, business rivals, cabinet members, U.S. Embassy officials, a Roman Catholic archbishop, and even a woman identified as Martinelli’s mistress.

Much of this alleged activity was made possible by the burgeoning business of private companies selling military-grade spyware. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that the retail market for surveillance tools had increased in value from virtually nothing 10 years prior to around $5 billion annually. Yet the market functions largely unencumbered, and even since the National Security Agency eavesdropping scandal broke in 2013, U.S. policymakers have paid little attention to firms that sell surveillance equipment to foreign governments.

The scandal in Panama offers a unique window into how dangerous the espionage export business has become. Without restrictive controls, the risks the industry poses will only grow: More and more countries will acquire the tools to perpetrate corruption and abuse human rights.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

THE GOVERNMENT’S USE of a controversial invasive technology for tracking phones just got a little more controversial.

The Anaheim Police Department has acknowledged in new documents that it uses surveillance devices known as Dirtboxes—plane-mounted stingrays—on aircraft flying above the Southern California city that is home to Disneyland, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the Anaheim Police Department have owned the Dirtbox since 2009 and a ground-based stingray since 2011, and may have loaned out the equipment to other cities across Orange County in the nearly seven years it has possessed the equipment.

“This cell phone spying program—which potentially affects the privacy of everyone from Orange County’s 3 million residents to the 16 million people who visit Disneyland every year—shows the dangers of allowing law enforcement to secretly acquire surveillance technology,” Matt Cagle, technology and civil liberties policy attorney for ACLU-NC wrote in a blog post about the new documents.

It is a documented fact that the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engaged in secret and illegal mind control experiments for at least 23 years.

The experiments officially ended in 1973, but may well continue to the present day. Interrogation and torture techniques developed during the experiments were still in use after the year 2000 at numerous military prisons, including Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

One of the stated goals of the mind control programs was laid out in a CIA memo from January 1952, which read: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”

The story in question relates to arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico, legal gun running in this case as part of a U.S. State Department program known as Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) — through which U.S. companies are approved to sell arms to Mexico, via the Mexican military. Given the situation in Mexico with the drug war, and the extent of the corruption within the government there, including its military, the DCS program appears to be a direct conduit for weapons transfers that empower narco-trafficking organizations.

In early December of this year, nearly three years after Narco News published its initial story on the DCS program, CBS News, via its well-marketed “Investigative Unit” (which takes credit for exposing the Fast and Furious ATF scandal story) published a story with a headline curiously similar to the one gracing the March 2009 Narco News story. The CBS story headline: Legal U.S. gun sales to Mexico arming cartels.

You have to wonder how the award-winning news network, backed by a multi-billion-dollar revenue stream, finally came to the decision to “investigate” the DCS weapons-diversion story.

Some insight is now coming your way. The back story, with email correspondence as proof, will now be laid out for you, kind readers, so that you can decide whether this “distinguished” pillar of the mainstream media, the former home of “the most trusted man in America,” anchorman Walter Cronkite, has now turned to appropriating the reporting work of others.

A former Justice Department lawyer is facing legal ethics charges for exposing the President George W. Bush-era surveillance tactics—a leak that earned The New York Times a Pulitzer and opened the debate about warrantless surveillance that continues today.

The lawyer, Thomas Tamm, now a Maryland state public defender, is accused of breaching Washington ethics rules for going to The New York Times instead of his superiors about his concerns about what was described as "the program."

Tamm was a member of the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review and, among other things, was charged with requesting electronic surveillance warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals Board of Professional Responsibility said Tamm became aware in 2004 that certain applications to the FISA Court for national security surveillance authority "were given special treatment."

"The applications could be signed only by the attorney General and were made only to the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The existence of these applications and this process was secret. Respondent became aware that there was some surveillance applications that were given special treatment," according to the charging document.

As “lockdown” is rolled out to the general public as the new norm, is anyone asking, what is lockdown? Or, why it is necessary?

First I want to say that the entire concept of lockdown is a lie, an illusion, it’s another psychological operation on the general public and here’s why:

1 – “Lockdown” is based on the delusion that we are all living in one big stadium or locker room that needs to be purged one locker at a time for there to be true justice or for the government to keep you “safe”. Of course thinking that it’s the government’s job to keep you safe is another delusion in itself.

2 – The “lockdown” psyop delusion makes everyone think that if police can barge into anyone’s home at will, then they will have the tools they need to catch the bad guys.

3 – The “lockdown” psyop delusion is based on the assumption that police are chasing the correct suspect. The idea that vigilante killings (Chris Dorner), patsies (Boston bombing), or that staged shooting (San Bernardino, Umpqua, Virginia TV Reporter etc) are now the norm, is not even part of the equation. Thus the lockdowns are based strictly on government and mass media controlled unchecked “evidence” … in other words, propaganda.

4 – The “lockdown” psyop delusion is based on the idea that a lockdown actually works, when in fact there are no historical examples where a lockdown was the direct tool that allowed police to catch a criminal. Criminals have been caught since the beginning of time without the concept of lockdown. In fact, in today’s world of high technology and government surveillance it is now easier than ever to get caught by police. More than ever, it is getting very difficult for criminals to hide from the control system. Therefore, more than at any point in history the concept of lockdown is NOT needed. It only serves as a tool to anger law-abiding citizens, trash the Constitution, and empower a tyrannical government.

Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was killed and other leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation were arrested Tuesday after the FBI and state police stopped vehicles about 20 miles north of Burns.

Authorities did not release the name of the person who died at the highway stop, but Finicum's daughter confirmed it was Finicum, 55, of Cane Beds, Arizona, one of the cowboy-hat wearing faces of the takeover.

"My dad was such a good good man, through and through," said Arianna Finicum Brown, 26, one of Finicum's 11 children. "He would never ever want to hurt somebody, but he does believe in defending freedom and he knew the risks involved."

Ryan Bundy, 43, of Bunkerville, Nev., suffered a minor gunshot wound in the confrontation about 4:30 p.m. along U.S. 395. He was treated and released from a local hospital and was in FBI custody, authorities said.

Also arrested during the stop were his brother, Ammon Bundy, 40, of Emmett, Idaho, Ryan W. Payne, 32, of Anaconda, Mont., Brian Cavalier, 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada, and Shawna J. Cox, 59, of Kanab, Utah. They were charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers, a felony.

Ammon Bundy, the leader of the armed group occupying a federal wildlife refuge near Burns, Oregon, and four others have been arrested by law enforcement amid gunfire, according to the FBI.
At 4:25 pm on Tuesday afternoon, the FBI and Oregon State Police “began an enforcement action to bring into custody a number of individuals associated with the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. During that arrest, there were shots fired," the Bureau said in a statement.

The FBI said one person who was “a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased.” He said they are not releasing any information on the person “pending identification by the medical examiner’s office.”

One person suffered non-life threatening injuries and was taken to a local hospital for treatment. He was arrested and is in custody.

The billionaire brothers are championing criminal-justice reform. Has their formula changed?

Starting in 2010, a controversial series of rulings by the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court essentially licensed unlimited political spending by corporations, unions, and individuals. Charles and David—a seventy-five-year-old patron of the arts, who is the wealthiest resident of Manhattan—were unusually prepared to take advantage of this shift. They had set up a broad alliance of donors and advocacy organizations to support conservative candidates who share their “pro-business” opposition to regulation, entitlements, and taxes. This network has since become one of the most powerful political forces in the country: a libertarian advocacy group backed by the brothers, Americans for Prosperity, has directors in thirty-four states. According to Politico, twelve hundred people work full-time for the Koch network—more than three times the number of people who work for the Republican National Committee.

The Department of Homeland Security remains unable to accurately report the number of aliens who illegally overstay their visas into the country more than 12 years after the agency was ordered to employ a tracking system to monitor these individuals, according to a new government oversight report that is highly critical of the department’s efforts.

More than 12 years after DHS was ordered to implement a biometric system to track the number of aliens who leave the United States when their visas expire, the agency is still in the planning stages and has failed to meet its mandated requirement, according the Government Accountability Office, which has been tracking the department’s progress since 2004.

“DHS had not yet fulfilled the 2004 statutory requirement to implement a biometric exit capability or the statutory requirement to report overstay estimates, and as of January 2016, DHS has planning efforts underway but has not yet met these requirements,” the GAO concluded in a new report released this month.

In the Land of the Free, one-quarter of the entire planet’s prison population, some 2.2 million people, currently languish behind bars; yet, an astonishing number of them — around 2 million — have never been to trial. Indeed, these figures categorically debunk the notion the criminal justice system in the United States maintains any semblance of its formation’s original intent: to ensure the guilty suffer punishment befitting their crimes, while the innocent avoid false conviction.

As the fundamental basis for the justice system in the United States, the Sixth Amendment states: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.”

Justice, as an untold — though no doubt, appalling — number can attest, has been utterly abandoned for the interests of the careless expedience, apathetic convenience, and unabashed profiteering of the U.S. prison-industrial machine.

“The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial,” explains award-winning journalist, Chris Hedges, in a recent Truthdig column. “There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97 percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining.” Of those millions who bargained away their right to a trial by accepting plea deals, “significant percentages of them are innocent.”

Monday, January 25, 2016

The U.S. Senate is poised to give President Obama and the next president unprecedented war powers that amount to declaring martial law upon the entire world. Majority leader Mitch McConnell surprised almost everyone last week by saying he has a war resolution ready to be voted on at any time.

The resolution is a new authorization for use of military force (AUMF) for declaring war on ISIS. It would give the president even more power than the AUMF granted to Bush after 9/11, which is still in place today.

“The AUMF put forward by McConnell would not restrict the president’s use of ground troops, nor have any limits related to time or geography. Nor would it touch on the issue of what to do with the 2001 AUMF, which the Obama administration has used to attack ISIS despite that authorization’s instructions to use force against those who planned the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”

Considering what Bush and Obama did with the 2001 AUMF—invading and occupying countries in “pre-emptive” war, CIA black sites, extrajudicial killings, inventing the term “enemy combatants” to bypass international law, new forms of torture, drone bombing women and children, and assassinating U.S. citizens—the specter of a new and expanded AUMF is truly frightening.

“This resolution is a total rewrite of the War Powers Clause in the U.S. Constitution,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn). “It is essentially a declaration of international martial law, a sweeping transfer of military power to the president that will allow him or her to send U.S. troops almost anywhere in the world, for almost any reason, with absolutely no limitations.”
McConnell’s resolution is more than what Obama asked for last year, but this is of little relevance since Obama has been carrying out a war against ISIS, including the use of special forces, with no authorization. The administration has refused to put forward a legal framework, insisting that the 2001 AUMF is enough.

While the Washington snowstorm dominated news coverage this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was operating behind the scenes to rush through the Senate what may be the most massive transfer of power from the Legislative to the Executive branch in our history. The senior Senator from Kentucky is scheming, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, to bypass normal Senate procedure to fast-track legislation to grant the president the authority to wage unlimited war for as long as he or his successors may wish.

The legislation makes the unconstitutional Iraq War authorization of 2002 look like a walk in the park. It will allow this president and future presidents to wage war against ISIS without restrictions on time, geographic scope, or the use of ground troops. It is a completely open-ended authorization for the president to use the military as he wishes for as long as he (or she) wishes. Even President Obama has expressed concern over how willing Congress is to hand him unlimited power to wage war.

The National Institute for Justice is seeking applications in 2016 for a grant program focused on “research and technology development leading to the introduction into practice of new, innovative means for: collecting digital evidence from mobile devices or large-scale computer networks, or for detecting human images.”

The research is meant to create solutions tailored for state and local law enforcement, according to the announcement.

Police departments have long used devices called Cellebrites to extract the contents of smartphones, a once straightforward process made complicated by Apple’s decision in 2014 to encrypt by default all iPhones running iOS 8 or later. (Cellebrite’s website boasts that it can unlock many devices running iOS 8, but doesn’t say it can break into the latest hardware models of the iPhone.) As long as those devices are protected by a password, law enforcement cannot decrypt information on the phones unless they can brute force hack them open. The NIJ grant asking for “innovative means for collecting digital evidence from mobile devices” may be oriented toward making brute force solutions available to police departments that don’t have the code-cracking resources of say, the NSA.

When President Obama secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin arming Syria’s embattled rebels in 2013, the spy agency knew it would have a willing partner to help pay for the covert operation. It was the same partner the C.I.A. has relied on for decades for money and discretion in far-off conflicts: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Since then, the C.I.A. and its Saudi counterpart have maintained an unusual arrangement for the rebel-training mission, which the Americans have code-named Timber Sycamore. Under the deal, current and former administration officials said, the Saudis contribute both weapons and large sums of money, and the C.I.A takes the lead in training the rebels on AK-47 assault rifles and tank-destroying missiles.

The support for the Syrian rebels is only the latest chapter in the decadeslong relationship between the spy services of Saudi Arabia and the United States, an alliance that has endured through the Iran-contra scandal, support for the mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan and proxy fights in Africa. Sometimes, as in Syria, the two countries have worked in concert. In others, Saudi Arabia has simply written checks underwriting American covert activities.

The U.S. military is beginning work on a new “implantable neural interface” that it hopes will allow wearers to transmit data back and forth from their brains to external digital devices.

That’s right—a brain modem. One that can connect to a staggering one million neurons at a time, up from the mere thousands that are possible today.

The implications are profound for the armed forces and civilians. Imagine controlling your tank, car or microwave oven with your mind. Or steering a drone with your thoughts and “seeing” what the drone’s sensors see—in real time. Imagine making a hands-free phone call by simply willing it… then talking out loud.

But don’t hold your breath. While the Pentagon’s brain modem is far from science fiction—cochlear implants, for example, represent a very basic form of one-way neural interface—it’s equally far from science fact. And it could be many years or decades before anything resembling the neural implant is even ready for testing. If ever.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the military’s fringe-science wing—announced the “Neural Engineering System Design” initiative on Jan. 19. The NESD program “aims to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world,” DARPA stated.

At least one of the emails on Hillary Clinton's private server contained extremely sensitive information identified by an intelligence agency as "HCS-O," which is the code used for reporting on human intelligence sources in ongoing operations, according to two sources not authorized to speak on the record.

Both sources are familiar with the intelligence community inspector general’s January 14 letter to Congress, advising the Oversight committees that intelligence beyond Top Secret -- known as Special Access Program (SAP) -- was identified in the Clinton emails, as well the supporting documents from the affected agencies that owned the information and have final say on classification.

According to a December 2013 policy document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence: This designation "is used to protect exceptionally fragile and unique IC (intelligence community) clandestine HUMINT operations and methods that are not intended for dissemination outside of the originating agency.”

It is not publicly known whether the information contained in the Clinton emails also revealed who the human source was, their nationality or affiliation.

A Department of Justice watchdog officially condemned the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration this month, following a report that the agency had recruited a Transportation Security Administration security screener to search bags for cash that the DEA could confiscate.

The very existence of such a partnership highlights much broader concerns about the controversial legal practice known as civil asset forfeiture, which critics say contorts law enforcement priorities and props up a system of policing for profit.

In a summary of its investigation, the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General concluded that the agreement "violated DEA policy" on a number of levels. While the OIG determined that the TSA informant never provided any actionable information to the DEA, it concluded that the plans to pay the agent out of the cash he or she helped seize "could have violated individuals’ protection against unreasonable searches and seizures if it led to a subsequent DEA enforcement action."

In effect, the OIG was questioning the propriety of an arrangement in which a TSA agent would use his or her power to tip off the DEA to the presence of cash in travelers' luggage, and then receive compensation based on how profitable that information was to the agency.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Thursday handed a critically important bank regulatory position to a longtime donor and corporate lawyer who defended financial institutions in private practice.

Cuomo nominated Maria Vullo to run the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS).

Benjamin Lawsky, Vullo’s predecessor in the office, gained a reputation as the toughest cop on Wall Street, imposing heavy fines for money laundering, accounting fraud, tax evasion, and fraudulent mortgage servicing. Lawsky used the ability to ban financial firms from business in the world financial center in New York to extract real accountability for wrongdoing.

And Lawsky’s aggressiveness shamed other regulators, prompting them to increase their activity.

Vullo, a former deputy to Cuomo in the state attorney general’s office, currently serves as Of Counsel for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a white shoe law firm in New York. She was a partner at Paul, Weiss for 20 years, and in her time there represented Wells Fargo and other “businesses in investigations and civil lawsuits stemming from the financial crisis,” according to the firm’s website.

The murder of ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in the UK was "probably" approved by President Vladimir Putin, an inquiry has found.

Mr Putin is likely to have signed off the poisoning of Mr Litvinenko with polonium-210 in part due to personal "antagonism" between the pair, it said.

Home Secretary Theresa May said the murder was a "blatant and unacceptable" breach of international law.

But the Russian Foreign Ministry said the public inquiry was "politicised".
It said: "We regret that the purely criminal case was politicised and overshadowed the general atmosphere of bilateral relations."

Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin's spokesman, said Moscow's official response to the report will happen through "diplomatic channels", the Russian news agency Interfax was quoted as saying.
Prime Minister David Cameron said the UK would have to go on having "some sort of relationship with them [Russia]" because of the Syria crisis, but it would be done with "clear eyes and a very cold heart".

The long-awaited report into Mr Litvinenko's death found that two Russian men - Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun - deliberately poisoned the 43-year-old in London in 2006 by putting the radioactive substance polonium-210 into his drink at a hotel.

Sir Robert Owen, the public inquiry chairman, said he was "sure" Mr Litvinenko's murder had been carried out by the two men and that they were probably acting under the direction of Moscow's FSB intelligence service, and approved by the organisation's chief, Nikolai Patrushev, as well as the Russian president.

He said Mr Litvinenko's work for British intelligence agencies, his criticism of the FSB and Mr Putin, and his association with other Russian dissidents were possible motives for his killing.

The German government is unable to say where more than half of the one million asylum seekers allowed into the country have ended up, MailOnline can exclusively reveal.

Government statistics show that Germany registered 1.1million applications by the end of last year under its EASY system, which does not record much more than an applicant's country of origin.

German Interior Ministry spokesman Dr Harald Neymanns admitted that delays in the processing of asylum seeker applications would account for some of those missing.
But he also said that in some cases refugees may not have stayed in Germany but instead gone on to a different country elsewhere in the EU.

A third explanation is that the refugees may not have existed in the first place - because some asylum seekers have been found to apply multiple times in an attempt to get sent to the city of their choice.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Like other agencies of the U.S. government back in the 1950s, the CIA saw rich promise in the idea of injecting radioactive materials into humans. But whereas documents recently released by the Department of Energy show radioactivated recipients usually to have been either unwitting (schoolchildren told they were getting “vitamin supplements”) or in unfortunate circumstances (lifers in prison, terminally ill patients), the Agency planned to inject radioactive matter into the bodies of its own agents, or personnel.

The CIA took the prudent course of destroying almost all its files on biological and chemical research back in 1973, on the orders of Richard Helms. The Agency now says piously it can find no record of any such activities. But researchers in the 1970s managed to unearth some bizarre and revealing documents, including one—never to our knowledge published—on “Establishing and substantiating the ‘bona fides’ of agent and/or staff personnel through techniques and methods other than interrogation.”

U.S. military activities in cyberspace have been surprisingly widespread over the years, occurring mainly out of the public eye. Given the sensitivity of many of their operations, this is understandable to a point, but as the number of reported and unreported attacks on military and civilian infrastructure increases – along with the stakes – there is a corresponding public interest in how the Pentagon (and the U.S. government in general) has responded in the past and is preparing for future eventualities. Today, the National Security Archive is posting 27 documents that help illuminate various aspects of U.S. military operations in cyberspace. These materials are part of a unique and expanding educational resource of previously classified or difficult-to-obtain documentation the Archive is collecting and cataloguing on the critical issue of cybersecurity.

Today’s posting, including a number of records acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, can be grouped into six areas: the language of cyberspace, vision and strategy, military cyber organization, activities and responsibilities, computer network defense, and intelligence operations in cyberspace. Highlights include:

The terminology of cyberspace (Document 1, Document 10)
The creation and responsibilities of the U.S. Cyber Command (Document 6, Document 8)
The role of the Cyber Command and other military cyber organizations in Operation Gladiator Shield – defense of the Global Information Grid (Document 12)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff-mandated process for computer network defense activities (Document 2)
The Department of Defense strategy for counterintelligence in cyberspace (Document 3)
DoD policy, responsibilities, and procedures with regard to human intelligence operations in cyberspace (Document 19)

There’s a debate happening right now over copyright bots, programs that social media websites use to scan users’ uploads for potential copyright infringement. A few powerful lobbyists want copyright law to require platforms that host third-party content to employ copyright bots, and require them to be stricter about what they take down. Big content companies call this nebulous proposal “notice-and-stay-down,” but it would really keep all users down, not just alleged infringers. In the process, it could give major content platforms like YouTube and Facebook an unfair advantage over competitors and startups (as if they needed any more advantages). “Notice-and-stay-down” is really “filter-everything.”

National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers said Thursday that “encryption is foundational to the future,” and arguing about it is a waste of time.

Speaking to the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., think tank, Rogers stressed that the cybersecurity battles the U.S. is destined to fight call for more widespread use of encryption, not less. “What you saw at OPM, you’re going to see a whole lot more of,” he said, referring to the massive hack of the Office of Personnel Management involving the personal data about 20 million people who have gotten background checks.

“So spending time arguing about ‘hey, encryption is bad and we ought to do away with it’ … that’s a waste of time to me,” he said, shaking his head.

“So what we’ve got to ask ourselves is, with that foundation, what’s the best way for us to deal with it? And how do we meet those very legitimate concerns from multiple perspectives?”

Other government officials — most notably FBI Director James Comey — have been crusading for a way that law enforcement can get access to encrypted data.

But technologists pretty much universally agree that creating some sort of special third-party access would weaken encryption to the point that it would threaten every internet transaction we make, from online banking to filling out our health records to emailing our friends and significant others. A hole in encryption for special FBI access would be a hole that criminals could sneak through, too.

False flag operations analyzed as a distinctively modern phenomena, post WWI; the planet being stolen by a transnational corporate financial class; ideological false flags including religions and nationalism; the propaganda spectrum including cultural values, educational system and news media; a war of corporate cultural control and imposition of a global police state; US Psychological Operations Manual; white, grey and black PSYOPs; regime change and color revolutions; NGOs; characteristics of a false flag.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

A federal judge has rejected President Barack Obama's assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress access to records pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious, a gunrunning probe that allegedly allowed thousands of weapons to flow across the border into Mexico.

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled Tuesday that the Justice Department's public disclosures about its response to the so-called "gun walking" controversy undercut Obama's executive privilege claim.

A VICE News investigation has found evidence that sophisticated surveillance equipment that spies on people's phones is being used across London, and uncovered a growing black market for the technology worldwide.

Signs of IMSI catchers — also known as stingrays or cell-site simulators — were found at several locations in the British capital, including UK parliament, a peaceful anti-austerity protest, and the Ecuadorian embassy.

A former senior surveillance insider also confirmed to VICE News that they have been used by UK police.

The portable devices are typically used by state law enforcement. They monitor thousands of phones at a time, and are capable of intercepting calls, text messages, and emails.

After going undercover, however, VICE News was offered an IMSI catcher for $15,000 from a company that claimed to have sold the devices to private companies and state law enforcement all over the world — including Russia, Africa, and the US.

EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton's emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government's most secretive and highly classified programs, according to an unclassified letter from a top inspector general to senior lawmakers.

Fox News exclusively obtained the unclassified letter, sent Jan. 14 from Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III. It laid out the findings of a recent comprehensive review by intelligence agencies that identified "several dozen" additional classified emails -- including specific intelligence known as "special access programs" (SAP).

That indicates a level of classification beyond even “top secret,” the label previously given to two emails found on her server, and brings even more scrutiny to the presidential candidate’s handling of the government’s closely held secrets.

A FORMER NAVY SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden and wrote a bestselling book about the raid is now the subject of a widening federal criminal investigation into whether he used his position as an elite commando for personal profit while on active duty, according to two people familiar with the case.

Matthew Bissonnette, the former SEAL and author of No Easy Day, a firsthand account of the 2011 bin Laden operation, had already been under investigation by both the Justice Department and the Navy for revealing classified information. The two people familiar with the probe said the current investigation, led by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, expanded after Bissonnette agreed to hand over a hard drive containing an unauthorized photo of the al Qaeda leader’s corpse. The government has fought to keep pictures of bin Laden’s body from being made public for what it claims are national security reasons.

The retired SEAL voluntarily provided investigators with a copy of his hard drive as part of an agreement not to prosecute him for unlawfully possessing classified material, according to the two people familiar with the deal.

If you think the National Security Agency (NSA) isn't interested in your information, you should take a road trip out to see the massive, nondescript, concrete buildings they operate in the sleepy town of Bluffdale, Utah.

Called the Utah or NSA Data Center, it may be one of the best representations for what the NSA considers to be its mission for the future: bulk online data collection. Although the NSA turned down our request to tour the facility with our cameras, we were able to talk to Pete Ashdown of the ISP provider XMission, who toured the facility as it was being built in 2012.

Monday, January 18, 2016

In a 4-3 decision, Massachusetts’ highest court ruled Friday that with a warrant, it's ok for police to search anywhere on a seized phone that may reasonably turn up evidence of the crime under investigation.

In the case of Commonwealth v. Dorelas, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (MSJC) found that because the Boston Police Department (BPD) had a warrant to search a criminal suspect’s seized iPhone, it could access his photos as well.

As the majority opinion found:

The defendant contends, however, that the police had probable cause only to search his telephone call and text files, and not his photograph file. We disagree. Communications can come in many forms including photographic, which the defendant freely admits. So long as such evidence may reasonably be found in the file containing the defendant's photographs, that file may be searched.

Glenn Frey, Eagles guitarist and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, passed away Monday. He was 67. "It is with the heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of our comrade, Eagles founder, Glenn Frey, in New York City on Monday, January 18th, 2016. Glenn fought a courageous battle for the past several weeks but, sadly, succumbed to complications from Rheumatoid Arthritis, Acute Ulcerative Colitis and Pneumonia," the Eagles wrote in a statement Monday.

The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 41 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current ‘62’, 53 are men and just nine are women.

Although world leaders have increasingly talked about the need to tackle inequality, and in September agreed a global goal to reduce it, the gap between the richest and the rest has widened dramatically in the past 12 months. Oxfam’s prediction, made ahead of last year’s Davos, that the 1% would soon own more than the rest of us, actually came true in 2015 - a year earlier than expected.

Oxfam is calling for urgent action to tackle the extreme inequality crisis which threatens to undermine the progress made in tackling poverty during the last quarter of a century. As a priority, it is calling for an end to the era of tax havens which has seen the increasing use of offshore centers by rich individuals and companies to avoid paying their fair share to society. This has denied governments valuable resources needed to tackle poverty and inequality.

Secret files exposing evidence of widespread match-fixing by players at the upper level of world tennis can today be revealed by BuzzFeed News and the BBC.

The sport’s governing bodies have been warned repeatedly about a core group of 16 players – all of whom have ranked in the top 50 – but none have faced any sanctions and more than half of them will begin playing at the Australian Open on Monday.

It has been seven years since world tennis authorities were first handed compelling evidence about a network of players suspected of fixing matches at major tournaments including Wimbledon following a landmark investigation, but all of them have been allowed to continue playing.

The investigation into men’s tennis by BuzzFeed News and the BBC is based on a cache of leaked documents from inside the sport – the Fixing Files – as well as an original analysis of the betting activity on 26,000 matches and interviews across three continents with gambling and match-fixing experts, tennis officials, and players.

The files contain detailed evidence of suspected match-fixing orchestrated by gambling syndicates in Russia and Italy, which was uncovered in the landmark 2008 probe, and which authorities subsequently shelved. “They could have got rid of a network of players that would have almost completely cleared the sport up,” said Mark Phillips, one of the investigators. “We gave them everything tied up with a nice pink bow on top and they took no action at all.”

The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis | According to a Memphis jury’s verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers “and other unknown co-conspirators,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.

In the complaint filed by the King family, “King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators,” the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies – particularly the FBI and Army intelligence – with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast. http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/MLKconExp.html

Under the umbrella of “civil forfeiture,” officers of the law confiscate millions of dollars in cash from thousands of individuals like Charles Clarke every year. In doing so, they need no proof that the money is obtained through illegal means. They do not need to file a criminal charge. The law flips the American justice system upside down: the burden of proving innocence is on the “suspect” -- and if he or she can’t do that, the property is fair game for officers to take.

Using cash that is unjustly seized from Americans, police departments across the nation buy firearms, SWAT gear, flat-screen TVs, and a slew of other goods they deem to be “essential” to operation.

But how exactly is this legal, and why is such a crazy procedure permitted in a country that prides itself on its civil liberties?

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Today is the 55th anniversary of a remarkable event: an American president, a former general no less, speaking to the nation about how the country was being held hostage by an undemocratic alliance he called the “military-industrial complex.”

Saturday, January 16, 2016

It’s been two weeks since an armed militia took over a federal wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon. In this special report, we’ll first hear from Ammon Bundy, the leader of the militia, as well as the Burns Paiute tribal chairwoman who disputes that ranchers are the ‘rightful owners’ of the refuge. Then, RT’s Simone Del Rosario sits down with the mayor of Burns, Oregon the town of the occupation, and a former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, the agency cited by the militia as a reason for occupation.

A brigadier general who led an Army biodefense lab in Utah is among a dozen individuals facing potential disciplinary actions — including loss of jobs — for egregious failures that contributed to the facility mistakenly shipping live anthrax to other labs for more than a decade, according to the military’s accountability investigation report that was provided to USA TODAY.

“Over time, you see there is complacency that the leadership should have recognized and taken action to correct,” Maj. Gen. Paul Ostrowski, who led the review team, said in an interview.

The review found that top officials at the Dugway Proving Ground southwest of Salt Lake City had multiple warning signs of scientific and safety problems, yet they failed to take action despite earlier, serious incidents in the facility’s labs during 2007-2011 involving anthrax, VX chemical nerve agent and poisonous Botulinum neurotoxin A.

“This complacent atmosphere resulted in an organization plagued by mistakes and unable to identify systemic issues in the high-risk, zero-defects world of biological select agents and toxins,” the report said.

The new Army report provides troubling details about lax operations at Dugway as staff worked with some of the world’s most deadly pathogens and nerve agents.

Despite being a major testing facility for the Army’s chemical and biological defense programs, Dugway had appointed an unqualified biosafety officer who lacked the education and training to do the job. The facility failed to have a program to routinely test surfaces in its labs to ensure contamination hadn't been spread outside special biosafety cabinets. And some staff “regularly manipulated data” in important records certifying that pathogens being shipped to other labs were killed and safe for other researchers to use without special protective equipment, the report said.

The review harshly singles out Brig. Gen. William E. King IV, who was in command at Dugway as a colonel from July 2009 to July 2011.

From the husband of an NYPD police officer who died on 9/11 comes an invitation to Sen. Ted Cruz.

“Senator Cruz, I was disappointed by your disparaging remarks about New York values somehow being different from Iowa and New Hampshire values,” read a Facebook post by retired NYPD Police Officer Jim Smith, husband of fallen Police Officer Moira Smith. “I invite you to come to the National 9-11 Memorial and Museum and see for yourself, and perhaps learn something about, the values of New Yorkers and the Heroes who defended American values on September 11th, 2001.”

The remarks in question accompanied Cruz’s suggestion that Donald Trump play “New York, New York” rather than “Born in the USA” at campaign rallies.

“Because Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values,” Cruz then said.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

On Monday the Supreme Court declined to hear a petition from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) that sought to force the Department of Homeland Security to release details of a secret “killswitch” protocol to shut down cellphone and internet service during emergencies.

EPIC has been fighting since 2011 to release the details of the program, which is known as Standard Operating Procedure 303. EPIC writes, “On March 9, 2006, the National Communications System (‘NCS’) approved SOP 303, however it was never released to the public. This secret document codifies a ‘shutdown and restoration process for use by commercial and private wireless networks during national crisis.’”

EPIC continues, “In a 2006-2007 Report, the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (‘NSTAC’) indicated that SOP 303 would be implemented under the coordination of the National Coordinating Center (‘NCC’) of the NSTAC, while the decision to shut down service would be made by state Homeland Security Advisors or individuals at DHS. The report indicates that NCC will determine if a shutdown is necessary based on a ‘series of questions.’”

Three months after the FedEx episode, on August 3rd, the task force descended on an apartment complex near the San Jose airport, rented in the name Steven Travis Brawner. Agents caught Rupard outside the complex, and served a search warrant on his apartment and storage unit later that day. They found $117,000 in US currency, 230 ounces of gold, and 588 ounces of silver, along with the dark gray hoodie tying him to the drop at the train station and a Verizon AirCard tying him to the bank accounts. By the time the case was over, the agents would recover more than $1.4 million.

The suspect was charged with 35 counts of wire fraud, 35 counts of aggravated identity theft, and three other miscellaneous charges — enough to keep him in jail for the rest of his life. Taking his fingerprints three days later, the police finally worked back to his name — not Rupard, or Stout, or Brawner, or Aldrich, or any of the others. His name was Daniel Rigmaiden.

But there was something else, something that wasn’t reported on the seizure affidavit, the complaint, or any of the documents that followed. To track Rigmaiden down, the investigators had used a secret device, one that allowed them to pinpoint their target with far more accuracy than Verizon could. They called it a cell-site simulator, or by its trade name, Stingray. Neither term was found in the court order that authorized its use. The device had to be kept secret, even from the courts.

The Stingray had worked perfectly. Agents traced the suspect’s AirCard back to his apartment and now had more than enough evidence for a conviction. But in the years that followed, that open-and-shut case would turn into something far more complex. Working from prison, Rigmaiden would unravel decades of secrecy, becoming the world’s foremost authority on the device that sent him to jail. By the time he was finished, a covert surveillance device and the system that kept it secret would be exposed to the public for the very first time.

The federal civil asset forfeiture law allows local police to get up to 80 percent of money or property seized, with the rest going to the federal government for their role in the investigations and for administering the program.

Lucas' case was among 117 in the 32-county Northern District of New York over the past five years in which the federal government used the law to seize $43 million in assets without having to charge the owners with a crime.

The Justice Department announced last month that it was shutting down the program, at least temporarily, under which the seized assets are shared among the police agencies involved in investigations. Federal officials cited budget constraints.

New York state seized more assets per capita under the civil asset forfeiture law than all but one other state in 2014. Police have been criticized for abusing the law to get quick access to money that they spend on new equipment, training and other expenses. They're not allowed to use the money to pay salaries.

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